In my Monsterhearts 2 review, I mentioned it was a “Powered by the Apocalypse” (PBTA) game. But what’s that mean?
It all goes back to the original Powered by the Apocalypse game: Apocalypse World, released Vincent and Meguey Baker in 2010.
In Apocalypse World, you play as survivors in a Mad Max-esque post-apocalyptic setting. You deal with rival gangs, resource scarcity, and the Psychic Maelstrom which caused all these problems in the first place. Its core mechanics were very different from the popular games of the time (like Dungeons & Dragons). Apocalypse World focuses almost entirely on narrative play, eschewing rules for combat in favor of telling a stronger story. It’s built so that every player embodies a set of tropes, and over the course of the game they can push or defy those story components.
Every PBTA game is based on Apocalypse World‘s formula. Due to its nature, PBTA games are particularly good at emulating a specific “genre”, where there are specific actions the players are expected to take. Some PBTA games hew very closely to the original formula; others stretch it much further.
Apocalypse World also has a certain ethos that echoes in the games that emulate it. This takes the form of robust advice for player characters, alongside an Agenda and Principles for everyone to follow. Most PBTA games have these, although the specifics are changed to fit the game at hand. In particular is the Agenda play to find out what happens, which almost every game follows. In essence, it means that very little should be planned, and the game should go whatever direction makes sense in the moment.
(Example: John Harper’s Blades in the Dark, which takes the PBTA formula and radically changes it into a risk-building heisting game. That game also has a lot of other games birthed from it, which are called Forged in the Dark.)
Many mechanical elements are borrowed from Apocalypse World too. In the future, I will expand this article to go into more detail on those.
2 Responses